John always beats me to writing better posts.

But yes, this question comes up often enough that we should take John Carter's write-up and turn it into an article or link to it from a number of places where anyone who cares might see it. Maybe it might even make it onto the WPN front page? I concur with everything he says and more. Plus, who can resist the wonderful metaphor of poor Timmy having his face torn off by Stabby McStabberson?

The price of boosters must be different between the US and Europe, so I won't compare the prices of entry, but here is what we do at FNM in the northern parts of Europe (ie. Turku, Finland).

Prize boosters in our store are given out according to record, always. This is very common in Regular events in our area. The only exception is Competitive events, which means Grand Prix Trials.
In addition, FNM promos go to first and second place (according to standings) and two to random players.
This usually translates into everyone trying their very best to get into first or second place, but anybody with a good record goes home with prizes. We also try to give out prizes quite “bottom heavy”, which means anyone with a x-1-1 or better record gets something. (With only three our four rounds, that's quite many players.)

This has translated into a better turnout, with Constructed FNM drawing 20-25 players on a regular basis.

In our LGSs, the FNMs are always capped at 3 rounds swiss, and prizes are given according to records.

Additional prizes are given during lucky draws.

A stable base of pool of players always play in their own favourite LGSs.

Originally posted by Adam Hubble:

For drafting, do you guys only pair within pods? Or do you have multiple pods for the draft and then a single set of pairings?

For drafts at Toys4U (the store I judge for), we started out doing the latter, but switched to the former to help speed up events and allow players to jump into another draft if they felt like it instead of doing a long 5 round experience with a bad draft deck (which was a complaint we started noticing from our players).

As people were not happy with the times we set up for the multiple 8-man pods, we have begun working with an “Early Bird” draft where the first 8 people who show up by a certain time can draft, then our main large event with as many pods as needed to fit the registrants for that week, and then finally a “Late Comers” draft where if people missed the cutoff for Main Event registration, and it's before a certain time we set up a pod for them (usually it consists of people from the Early Bird pod who either dropped/the event finished as well as people arriving past cutoff for Main Event) and they're still able to draft.

Also, all throughout the night, if 8 people show up and want to draft (checking for time restraints with the shop), we set a pod up for them immediately and let them play. It's a pretty flexible system, and it's worked pretty well for our players out here.

Our store usualy gives 1 booster per player in a draft and 1, 5 booster per player for a T2 FNM. Every players are ok with that prizing. The prizing is usualy based on swiss rounds ranking.

Edited Eddy Bollue (Dec. 16, 2012 05:26:31 AM)